Ranking college football teams is contentious stuff, and since I love football and math and human nature, this is one of my favorite topics.

Since I’m a jerk, I like making fun of people, and over-rating things is easy pickings.  People are optimistic; they run in herds (so do lemmings), and they are bad at math and statistics.  So, since figuring your own ratings takes time while poking fun at the overly optimistic is easy (sports is a target-rich zone), I just point out rankings that are likely to be too high.  I’ll get some of these wrong (shrugs:  so does everyone, that’s how the pointy ball bounces), but I’ll also get to point and Nelson-laugh a time or two most weeks.

To get us started, I stuck my neck out and had some opinions last week and was brave enough to put them in writing.  Like most first weeks, this one didn’t tell us much, but a couple of teams failed to handle their cupcakes well.

Week Zero Most OverRated Football Program Results

1 UCF                         played nobody

2 Northwestern           oops; see below
3 Washington St         played nobody

4 Florida                      barely survived Miami
5 Utah                         did not man-handle BYU
6 Syracuse                   hung 24 on Liberty!
7 Iowa St                     edged North Iowa . . . edged!
8 Texas                        played nobody
8 Stanford                   hung 17 on Northwestern!
8 Georgia                    handled Vandy
11 Clemson                 destroyed hapless Ga Tech
11 Oklahoma               was sorely tested by Houston
11 LSU                       played nobody

 

So not much news, irony, or missteps . . . as we would expect.

 

I honestly can’t figure out why I had an opinion about them

Northwestern:  how’d they get in my list last week!?  I have no idea. . . . . . let’s get back to business.

 

So I had a clerical error and a few insights for the first week.  Since the weekend, the AP re-racked its votes and came out with a new top 25, so here’s, predictably,

Week Two Most OverRated Football Program Results

1        Iowa St            how our new king is still ranked at all?

2        Florida             no one will admit they were wrong yet

3        Utah                they know something or I do; we can’t both be right
3        Syracuse          holding steady, their news yet to come
5        Texas               the Notre Dame of southwestern over-ratedness

5        Michigan St    joins our list after stomping little Tulsa
5        Georgia           is good, but more than two teams are even better

8        UCF                opinions and facts are coming together slowly

9        Notre Dame     perennially over-rated, they finally join our list

9        Texas A&M    joins the list after blowing up Texas State at home

9        Auburn            is suddenly slightly over-rated after defeating Oregon

12        Stanford          proved enough to be somewhat less over-rated
12        Clemson          it’s always easy to say the number one team is slightly over-rated

12        Oklahoma        is plenty deep, solid, and might justify the hype eventually

12        Oregon                        got spanked in the ratings but is still barely over-rated

 

No Longer OverRated Because I was Wrong

LSU                            I think this was a brain fart, but I should have caught it so my bad

Washington St            proved enough to come off my list

 

So closes another week in silly season.